


Meme-fill Collection: The Avengers and Co

by cephalopodcat



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cuddling, F/M, M/M, Multi, Other, Sadness, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 09:50:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2265207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cephalopodcat/pseuds/cephalopodcat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of fills for an ask meme on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meme-fill Collection: The Avengers and Co

**Author's Note:**

> Clint/Natasha - "Have you seen the...? Oh."
> 
> I have much love for these two and no one can talk me out of it okay.

The mission was long, and dumb, and in the end, essentially pointless because it had been a wild goose chase to begin with. Not that SHIELD could risk a possible AIM terrorist cell going unhindered, of course. 

Clint was fine with the job, it got him out of his apartment for a while, and actually, he didn't mind so much doing undercover work with Nat. She was good company, and saner than most of his friends seemed to be. (When your friends were Captain America, Tony Motherfucking Stark, a very zen dude with a manic alter ego, and well, THOR, it wasn't hard to end up as the 'only sane man'. Or woman, as it were.) 

Not that Bulgaria was actually very interesting while they were there. Nor was it actually quite the same with their new handlers- Coulson had had a certain calmness about him that Clint still missed sorely, and while Natasha didn't tend to speak on it, he knew she missed him too. The other Avengers may have taken his death to heart, but they hadn't worked with him as closely as Natasha and Clint had, nor for anywhere NEAR as long.   
  
All things being said, it really wasn't the same. Agent Dyson was a fine man, and Clint knew that if he was assigned as their go-between, he had to have been at least halfway intelligent. The mission went off fine, even if it was a total bust. 

Fury had called back Natasha to DC for some reason shortly thereafter, and Clint had been sent on ahead with Agent Dyson and his team to Afghanistan for a follow-up mission. 

And then things had gone pear-shaped. 

He only knew fragments of what ended up happening in DC, and had gotten shot twice for being dumb enough to risk information over his own well being but- Fury, dead? And Nat a traitor? And Steve... fortunately he was WELL caught yup on the HYDRA-is-SHIELD fiasco. 

Turns out Agent Dyson wasn't so nice after all. Clint had left him in their (incredibly compromised, as it had turned out) bunker with an arrow in his chest. And one in his kneecap because he'd bought decaf coffee that morning and Clint had  _really_  needed an excuse. The other agents had either met a similar fate or taken off- the few SHIELD-loyal ones shooed away at Clint's own insistence, because he did have a heart, you know- and Clint was in no mood to track down the stragglers. 

He figured he'd be doing that for the next couple years  _anyway._  

Sure, not the best plan, but after watching footage of the helicarriers going down in the Potomac, after NOT seeing news that Captain America had made it off the final one, after frantic phone calls and scrambling for information and aliases and safe houses, after finding out Agent Hand was dead and Fury had been shot, That Cap was hospitalized and SHIELD's infobanks were dumped, after finding Natasha's playbook online for anyone to see, after finding his  _own_  not-so-sparkly history of actions on some internet database...  
  
Clint had a couple other things to worry about.   
  
He never even saw Cap when he got back, him and his new friend (a guy with some really  _stupid_  nickname Hawkeye hadn't bothered to remember) had gone gallivanting off across Europe to track down some not-as-dead-as-he-reasonably-should-be friend of Steve's. Maria he'd gotten on the phone soon after the whole thing had blown up, and she'd assured him she was safe and she'd tried to get in touch with anyone she thought she could still trust, and that he'd be welcome with Stark... Stark had sent him several emails and messages as well, and while Clint did NOT have the patience to go through them yet, he knew he was going to have to pretty soon. 

All he really wanted to do was go home. And maybe, like, sleep for a few months.

He was lucky, actually, in that he was a lot less well-known and a lot less infamous than 'Tasha, because most people now, even after the data on them went public, didn't recognize him hailing a cab in the rain just outside of Dulles Airport. He made it to his DC safehouse without much trouble (and he reminded himself to tell Phil 'thanks' for the tip about claiming to be an Olympic archer in-training when security had processed his bow, and then promptly kicked himself for it) and had just cracked the door when everything in his body went on alert.   
  
"Shit." He said, an arrow already between his fingers before he had even managed a full step back. Someone was in his apartment. He could tell- usually when he left it smelled like stale coffee and drywall by the time he cracked the door again, but there was an open window somewhere and he could smell rain.   
  
He had his bow in his hand be the time he made it to the living room, arrow nocked on the string and tired resolve on his face. Then he lowered the arrow.   
  
"Wasn't expecting company." Clint said as he set the bow down on his coffee table and dropped onto the couch next to Natasha.   
  
"Your phone was off." She said in reply, stirring the tea she'd made in his 'I <3 Law and Order' mug. "I tried calling you. Not my fault you're not picking up."

"And what if I'd shot you?" Clint said, deciding changing out of his plane-rumpled clothing was way too much effort when the couch was  _right here._ "What with everything that's happened, you think you'd be a little more vigilant."

"You wouldn't have." Natasha replied, leaning back over the couch to grab a box of room-temperature pizza and pass it to him. "And I am vigilant. If it hadn't have been you coming in, you'd be dead." Clint grinned at her, and the look in his eyes was as much love as anything else. Or maybe that was for the pizza.

"You're right, I know you can take care of yourself. But you should have led with pizza." He said, talking around a mouthful. "Much nicer to people who feed me."

Natasha just smiled at him, and for a second, it felt like things could be normal again. Like he hadn't just spend the past couple weeks being sick to death that she was hurt, or dead, or worse, a traitor. Like he hadn't watched something he'd almost devoted himself to fall apart like rotten wood. Like he hadn't shot a guy he thought of as a friend straight through the eye and then had wondered if he'd have to do the same thing to Tasha too. 

For a while he could pretend things were normal again. (After New York, he'd realized they probably never would be. But he could pretend.)

"Are you okay...?" He asked Natasha after a while, as she watched him scarf down the pizza and check his apartment for bugs and/or HYDRA agents in his closets. "You and Nick were close."   
  
He didn't have to say much more. She broke eye contact and stirred her tea again, shrugging. (And he knew she was doing that for his benefit, because she did not have tells that simple.) "I'll live." She said. "Steve's fine, by the way..."   
  
Clint laughed and nodded. "I know. Stark's been emailing me about it incessantly. Not him I'm worried about." He dropped back down on the couch after his sweep of the small apartment. He trusted Nat, too, of course, and didn't think she'd be here if she hadn't already assured herself of relative privacy, but still. Old habits, or something. "Seriously, Tasha, shit was falling apart out there. Are you...?"  
  
"I'm  _fine_ , Barton." Natasha said, and that was the end of that.

Last names were strictly reserved for that sort of finality. She apparently wasn't in the mood to talk about it. Clint sort of understood- she put distance between herself and her problems. Clint had always been the sort to try and sort through things on his downtime, so he didn't bring any baggage to assignments, but he'd long ago learned Natasha didn't work that way. She'd listen to him go on after missions, but he rarely got a peep out of her. She was a master at compartmentalizing. Guess that was why she was a top class spy, or whatever. Other reasons, too, but he figured that part of her personality went hand in hand with the spy part. (He'd never asked if it came from anywhere else. He respected her too much to try. He'd read her file when he brought her in to SHIELD. Anything else, she'd tell him if and only if she felt like it.)

"Sure thing. In that case, you do what you want, and I'll be right here catching up on three months of bad sitcoms." He said, sprawling back along the couch and sighing. "Have you seen the remote...? Oh." He'd just about gathered the remote control from under the couch when she'd fallen into him. 

She didn't say anything. But she wrapped her arms around him and inhaled, pressing her face into his sweatshirt and giving no hint that she planned to move any time soon. "I'm glad you're alive." She said, as calmly as ever, before she'd lain her head back down and tucked herself in between him and the back of the couch.

Clint clicked the tv on, and let the dramatic exclamations of some telenovella fill the room. Someone killed someone, or someone was sleeping with someone's evil twin brother, or maybe it was just a used car commercial, Clint didn't know. Nor did he care. Natasha didn't talk after missions, but some people didn't like to talk. He'd accepted it as part of Nat years back. 

Then he wrapped an around her shoulders and nodded. "Yeah. Me too, but about you." 

Clint knew her better than he ever said out loud. Didn't need to say it, she knew. They both knew. It was one of the big unspoken declarations hanging above them both, had been for years. 'I love you. I care about you. I'm here for you.' A lot of the younger agents in SHIELD assigned to their missions thought they were cold, or scary, or heartless. Not true. They just had an understanding. An understanding comprised of Clint's quiet bitching after missions, and of cold pizza and bad tv and just being there when she needed him to be. 

Right now she needed him to be. 

"Thanks for the pizza." He said, about an hour later. He had his chin resting on the crown of her head, and had tucked the remote between her neck and shoulder. 

"No problem." She murmured, an arm thrown over his stomach, her legs tucked up in the space between his chest and his folded-up knees, and she'd been the one to finish off the last two slices of cold pizza.

"So it looks like we're gonna be in the market for new jobs." He said. "Think the local supermarket is willing to hire us, with no work experience other than 'super spies' on our resumes?"

"I'm sure there's something out there for us. And if nothing pans out, we can go to Peru and raise llamas."

Clint chuckled. "I'm never living that down am I?"  
  
Natasha didn't answer. But he could feel her smile in his bones. 

 


End file.
